Usability Lecture with Dr. Jeff Bacha – October 23!

The Business and Technical Writing Program at UAHuntsville and the Society for Technical Communication Huntsville/North Alabama present a lecture by Dr. Jeff Bacha, a technical communication professor from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. The lecture will be held at 6:30 on October 23 in Frank Franz Hall Room 138 on the UAHuntsville campus. The lecture is free and open to the public; technical communicators, web designers, usability specialists, computer programmers, and students are encouraged to attend.

In this lecture, Dr. Bacha addresses usability expert Robert Johnson’s 2010 claim that the term “user-centered” had “become ubiquitous and is in danger of being rendered meaningless” (335). Dr. Bacha argues that technical communication specialists and web designers can rhetorically respond to Johnson’s claim by adopting “In-Context” usability studies founded on observing actual users perform work-related activities inside their own natural workplace environment.

Dr. Bacha received his Ph.D from Purdue University in 2012. At Purdue, he served as the webmaster of the Purdue OWL. His scholarship has been published in The Journal of Technical Writing and Communication and in the collection Content Management: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice.